I’ve decided to newly commit myself to updating my blog. I’m really going to delve deep into the leaf-mould of my mind for new post ideas. Also, I plan to start writing articles for Medium in the hopes of making a bit of an income as a writer and growing my nonfiction portfolio.

As a result, you can expect more content about fiction writing techniques, particularly speculative fiction techniques, as well as the occasional reflection on whatever book I’m reading right now.

What is a leaf-mould, you might ask?

A leaf-mould is something like the sum of all the creative influences a mind gathers over the years. It is the fertile soil on which the imagination thrives.

The concept comes from J.R.R. Tolkien, who once wrote about The Lord of the Rings in a letter. He said that “one writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.”

This was an inspirational quote that Jeanne Cavelos shared when I attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2016. It reminds us that creativity is an organic process that emerges like a living thing out of the soil.

Over the coming months, I hope to make this blog a repository for my leaf-mould. I also hope to become more serious in getting articles published. Posting may be slower at first as I find my wings, but after a while, I hope to be writing and posting for this blog every week.

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You will read selections from speculative fiction authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Charles de Lint, and China Miéville, while working on your own short story to be workshopped in class.

The 12-week course begins January 7th. Register for the course through the Thomas More Institute website. Questions may be directed to me at matthew.rettino@gmail.com.

I’m back from attending Can-Con 2018 in Ottawa and figured I’d officially announce that I’ve made my first story sale. Hurrah!

“The Pilgrim’s Yoke” is the story of a pilgrim who seeks the waters of life and is refused. I wrote it as a sort of deconstruction of the hero’s journey, while building on my personal experience of pilgrimage, dissatisfaction, and the indescribable nature of the numinous.

David Demchuk, who attended Montreal’s Blue Metropolis festival earlier this year, is the author of a Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated collection of horror short stories, The Bone Mother. This was quite an accomplishment for a horror writer, especially since writers of horror fiction are so often excluded from the literary mainstream. The Bone Mother, set in the interwar period in Eastern Europe, is inspired by Slavic folklore and the stunning and slightly disquieting photographic archive of Romanian photographer Costică Ascinte.

I won’t say much else about it here except that the book itself seemed to dovetail nicely with my Master’s thesis, which investigated, in part, what the difference between magic realism and fantasy set in the primary world is, if there exists a difference at all. Demchuk’s novel does serve to blur the lines, but at the Blue Metropolis, he was adamant in insisting The Bone Mother is not magic realism but straight-up horror.

It has been four months since I attended this year’s Congrès Boréal, so a write-up on the conference is probably overdue. Nevertheless, I would like to share some of my impressions of my first foray into this predominantly French-language science fiction and fantasy convention.

Congrès Boréal is probably Québec’s main literary fantasy and science fiction convention. It was held in Montreal at the Masonic Temple on Sherbrooke Street last May. I attended to see some familiar faces–Jo Walton and Claude Lalumière were both participating in panels in the English stream–and to acquaint myself with the Francophone writers participating in the convention.

The first panel I attended was called “L’imaginaire a-t-il une langue? Différence culturelle dans l’imaginaire anglophone et francophone” (“Does the imagination have a language? Cultural differences in the anglophone and francophone imaginary.”) The panelists included Olivier Paquet, a science fiction writer from France, Patrick Senecal, a thriller/horror writer in the vein of Stephen King, and Marie Bilodeau, whose English novels have been translated into French.

The discussion was lively and interesting. While there is perhaps less difference between French and English science fiction and fantasy literature than might be assumed at first, the panelists did spot some general trends that mark some dramatic differences. For example, the panelists seemed to agree that sensuality, graphic violence, and unhappy endings are generally more acceptable to French-speaking audiences than to anglophone audiences. Perhaps this was result of old fashioned Anglo-Saxon puritanism, or the American love for Walt Disney-style happy endings. Either way, this traits seemed to me to mark the greatest difference.

Much Québécois horror is inspired from the European horror scene, which tends toward serial killer narratives more than, say, fantastic horror. However, as Paquet explained, pessimism is not the only story in France. The country that produced the scientific optimism associated with Jules Verne continues that tradition in its brand of science fiction that focuses more on sociological issues, as well as adventure.

One interesting idea that arose: language does not inherently carry the values of a society. Rather, culture does. The different traumas and schisms that define a society do have a much greater influence on national literature. For example, Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem, remarked one of the panelists, is marked by the impact of the Cultural Revolution in China. This echoes how French SF is marked by the policy of laïcité (state secularism), the origins of which go back to the French Revolution. There did seem to be truth to this observation, given how French-language SF is in a sense more “secular” in its embrace of violent and sexual themes that would religious people shiver. On the other hand, anglophone SF retains a more “puritanical” attitude in the literature it produces and censors, particularly in the United States.

This being said, certain attitudes to the French language itself do influence French SF. Patrick Senecal pointed out later in the discussion that French-language editors have a tendency to homogenize the different registers of the language, leading to less linguistic diversity. When editing dialogue, French publishers often edit out regional dialect in favour of “le Français internationale.” The result is a banal, grammatically correct French, where all characters sound the same. These editing decisions do not accommodate the regional French spoken in certain regions of Québec, for example, which leads to a more monovocal (as opposed to polyvocal) body of literature. This is not just unappealing; it’s unrealistic and unrepresentative of how French is actually spoken. As Senecal quipped, “Il n’y a personne qui parle comme Radio Canada!”

Congrès Boréal was held at the Montreal Masonic Memorial Temple

It was fascinating to learn a little bit more about the French-language SF scene here in Québec. As a McGill student and a West Islander, I guess I’m a quintessential Anglo. I don’t read much in French. But perhaps the reason, aside from the language barrier (I read slow in French), is because I’ve never really sought out French literature I enjoy.

Back in March, I picked up Aliette de Bodard’s The House of Shattered Wings in Emmanuelle Chastellière’s French translation, La Chute de La Maison aux Fleches D’Argent. I’m still working through it, but I’ve managed to banish the disagreeable, singsong voice that used to play in my head whenever I would read French books. This voice is a relic from my high school experience reading in French and I’ve finally managed to suppress it. This greater maturity has helped me enjoy reading in French. Though I still have ways to go, breaking my self-imposed taboo has been one mark of progress.

I purchased several issues of Brins d’Éterinté at the con, a Quebec SF magazine, as a promise to myself to read more and expand my vocabulary. One issue had published a translation of a Helen Marshall story, which I certainly appreciated as a fan of her work. French SF writers tend to read English SF a lot more than anglophone writers read French SF, but maybe I can buck that trend. I was pleasantly surprised that several attractive revues SF were represented at the con, such as Clair/Obscure, Étranges Lectures (from France), and Horizons Imaginaries, a CEGEP Marianopolis-based publication which won a prize at the con.

Perhaps working on my French can be my excuse to dig deeper in Quebec SF. In any case, the con was an eye-opening experience, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in attending. The next conference will be in Sherbrooke in 2019.

The Flaw in the Stone, Cynthea Masson’s second novel in her Alchemists’ Council trilogy, explores the occult origins of the Rebel Branch’s revolution against the Alchemists’ Council. In a world where manuscript scholarship is the key to harmonizing the universe’s dimensions, the balance of power is about to be thrown off kilter.

Genevre, an outside world scribe currently inhabiting Flaw dimension, unlocks a forbidden text that will give the rebels an advantage over Council dimension for the first time in thousands of years. Seizing the opportunity, the High Azoth of the Rebel Branch, Dracaen, plans to use the long-forgotten alchemical formula to destroy the Lapis, the source of the Alchemists’ Council’s power. However, when his obsession becomes tyrannical, Cedar and Saule form a risky plan to unite rebels and alchemists, while preserving both free will and interdimensional balance. In choosing to switch allegiances, however, they risk the destruction of both worlds.

The story takes place over hundreds of years and across multiple dimensions without losing its intrigue. It carries the reader from the dark caverns of Flaw dimension to the bright gardens of Council dimension, as well as the outside-world protectorates of Vienna, Qingdao, and Santa Fe. Some scribes aligned with the alchemists become rebels, while some rebels become alchemists.

The complex allegiances are complicated further because The Flaw in the Stone develops several protagonists instead of focusing on one, as the first novel of the series did. The downside to having so many characters is less focus. However, the ethically complex problem of free will brings unity to the novel, since it is explored in different ways. Since any changes made to the Lapis in Council dimension affect all dimensions, the alchemists essentially control humanity and the outside world. Dracaen conscripts Melia and Jinjing to assist him in his plan to overthrow the Council in the name of preserving humanity’s freedom. However, in doing so, he compels both women to undergo an emotionally devastating alchemical ritual that will give the Rebel branch the upper hand. This leads them to question whether their commitment to Dracaen’s rebellion was really worth the cost.

Dracaen forces Melia to conceive an alchemical child, an entity of such power that he believes it will help the rebels destroy the Lapis. Melia feels “like a mere vessel, like a human alembic whose sole purpose was to incubate and then deliver a miracle child” (146). Her anxiety reveals not only her fear of pregnancy but her anger at being objectified. The power dynamic inherent in Dracaen’s relationship with Melia recalls recent public discussions about consent. This forced incubation, committed in the name of freedom, ironically makes Dracaen as tyrannical as the most dogmatic Council-dimension alchemists.

Historical allusions add poignancy to the Rebel branch’s revolt. Since changes to the Lapis affect the outside world, the Rebel branch’s attempt to eliminate it in 1914 more or less causes the First World War. In one memorable scene, Saule, Genevre, and Jinjing hide out in the Qingdao protectorate as the Japanese bombard the city, an allusion to the 1914 Siege of Tsingtao (Qingdao). Other historical events are alluded to implicitly. One attempt to eliminate the Flaw is said to have been “responsible for the Mongol Conquests” (188). Also, it is no coincidence that the novel begins in 1848, when a wave of social uprisings swept across Europe. Though this historical allusion is not explicitly developed, the date adds poignancy to the rebels’ struggle–perhaps an ironic poignancy, given that outside world events are only reflections of the harmony within Council dimension. Does this reduce the free agency of the human beings who participated in these events?

Masson’s scholarly knowledge of alchemical manuscripts lends the world she has constructed a certain authenticity. For example, she bases Ilex and Melia’s mutual conjunction upon the alchemical concept of the Rebis, a man and woman combined into a single individual. Her training as a medievalist comes across in her writing style, which is formal and academic.

The Flaw in the Stone fills in many of the unanswered questions readers are left with at the end of The Alchemists’ Council. In a pleasant surprise, the novel’s timeline continues into the twenty-first century, bringing the action up to date with the end of the first book and setting up the final book of the trilogy.

This past literary season, I attended several events, including the Blue Metropolis festival and Le Congrès Boreal. Posts on each event are forthcoming. Today’s post is about the panel discussion I attended at Blue Met entitled “The Children of Mary Shelley.”

Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein

Frankenstein, which celebrates its 200th publication anniversary this year, has often been called the first science fiction novel. While Frankenstein’s monster is a recognizable figure in pop culture, it has its origin in the nested epistolary narratives of Shelley’s Gothic bildungsroman. To what extent can today’s science fiction trace its roots back to Frankenstein, given the vital, diversified, and increasingly popular genre it is today?

The moderator, Su J. Sokol, asked the panelists what was so groundbreaking about Frankenstein when it first appeared in print in 1818. Was it the first SF novel?

Amal el-Mohtar, the first panelist, responded that it was certainly “a first,” even if not “the first” SF novel. She referenced Awaj bin Anfaq, North African alien contact story written in the thirteenth century, to suggest that science fiction has much earlier, non-Western origins. However, there is something to be gained, she said, in tracing SF’s origins back to Mary Shelley, since women authors tend to be underrepresented in SF, a genre often defined by how “STEM-y” it is.

Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyages to the Moon and the Sun could qualify as science fiction avant la lettre, so I would concur with Amal: Frankenstein is by no means “the first” SF novel, even in the West. But it remains a politically meaningful gesture to trace the genre’s origin’s back to Mary Shelley.

Melissa Yuan-Innes, the second panelist, made the interesting point that Frankenstein is not terribly “STEM-y” when you look at it closely. Though there is some (pseudo)science in what Victor does to reanimate the dead, he is highly irresponsible ethically. Furthermore, he works in isolation, while scientists typically work in research teams, sharing the results of their knowledge. Perhaps it is this isolation that makes Victor’s experiments with reanimating the dead seem so wrong.

David Demchuk, the third panelist, dissented. He paraphrased Samuel “Chip” Delaney’s observation that Frankenstein isn’t really science fiction at all–it’s Gothic fiction. The book is less about hard scientific inquiry and more about an ethical question: “How do you imbue something with the spark of life, and if you do that, what is your responsibility?”

David also pointed out that Victor tends to look towards past knowledge, such as alchemy and the works of Paracelsus and Galen. However, science fiction is a genre that typically looks toward the future. Thus, Frankenstein exists simultaneously as a past-focused Gothic novel and future-oriented proto-science fiction novel; it stands at a crossroads between old and new ways of understanding nature.

Listening to the panelists, I remembered just how different the novel is from various Frankenstein films. Amal pointed out that the monster’s interiority is mediated through several levels of epistolary narration, which is usually lost on film. (As an aside, I remember that the Frankenstein episode on the 90s children’s TV show Wishbone showed the framing narrative, which takes place in the Arctic.)

The monster’s self-education is another feature of the novel that doesn’t get enough attention. In Shelley’s novel, the monster learns how to speak clearly and in an erudite fashion by reading Milton’s Paradise Lost. Though he may be ugly, he speaks like a rational soul. Melissa underlined this point, stating that the monster’s physical ugliness should not be taken to correspond with an ugly morality, just as Victor’s handsomeness does not mean he is a moral person.

What really interested me was when Amal pointed out that feminist scholars have interpreted the monster’s self-education as an analogy for the reality of women’s education at the time. Mary Shelley was self-taught and read novels on her own because women were denied the full education men received. Furthermore, at the time it was thought that women should be discouraged from reading, because reading novels “inflamed” women’s minds, much like reading Milton “inflames” the monster’s mind. But really, the reason the monster acts violently is because of educational neglect, suggesting how detrimental the neglect of women’s education can also be.

This argument appealed to me because I’d assumed most femininst interpretations of Frankenstein followed the idea that the monster’s story is an allegory of childbirth-gone-wrong. The monster’s education as an analogy for women’s education seems a more authentic analogy for women’s actual experiences, especially the experiences of a self-educated, literary woman like Mary Shelley.

All this goes to show that Victor Frankenstein’s monster is not really a monster, but a creature who has suffered horrendous neglect. And it is Victor’s neglect of his creation that turns him into the true monster.

Overall, “The Children of Mary Shelley” was a highly productive and fascinating panel. Although the Blue Metropolis festival tends to focus more on literary fiction, I hope to attend more science fiction and fantasy-based panels at the festival in the future.

In my flash fiction story, “In the Ruins of Shambhala” (published in audio format with 600 Second Saga), UN employee Amar Chatterjee encounters a booby trap while exploring an ancient Buddhist temple. But the trap Amar encounters is far from your typical Indiana Jones-style booby trap. It’s something much more real and sinister.

Indy might step on paving stones that shoot blow darts through slots in the wall and he might run away from giant rolling boulders, but these traps are unrealistic and not the kind I’m talking about.

While researching “In the Ruins of Shambhala,” I wanted to know more about the all-too-real dangers archaeologists actually face. But archaeology rarely involves greater dangers than you might encounter on a camping trip: snakebite, heatstroke, dehydration, and other environmental and health hazards.

However, there are some cases where archaeologists do run great safety risks. The difference here is that these traps typically use modern technology. I’m talking about landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) here.

Many countries with a rich distribution of archaeological deposits also happen to have endured highly destructive–and explosive–wars. Nations like Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq, Syria, and Georgia have extensive minefields that occasionally make archaeology a highly risky profession.

The landmine Amar defuses is much more than a new spin on a cliché. It provides a commentary on the issue of cultural heritage at risk–a theme I believe archaeological thrillers could explore more fruitfully.

Mes Aynak in Afghanistan, the site of an ancient Buddhist monastery, is one prominent example of a threatened cultural heritage site. Brent E. Huffman’s documentary Saving Mes Aynak tells the story of the bold Afghan archaeologist Qadir Temori, who leads an excavation of this monastery. The site itself is currently threatened by the development of a Chinese copper mine. To add to his difficulties, Qadir must endure repeated death threats by the Taliban to cease his excavations.

Landmines enter into it because the hill of Mes Aynak contains many of them, buried right alongside the artefacts. At one point in the film, the director interviews a digger who once swung a pickaxe directly onto a landmine, triggering an explosion. He was badly maimed, but other diggers were not so lucky.

What Saving Mes Aynak shows is that the real archaeologists who face danger in their jobs are not guys like Indiana Jones. They’re guys like Qadir.

Archaeologists working in war-torn countries, under the pressure of dictatorships, or in the presence of ongoing civil wars–those are the ones who run the greatest risks in their profession. The explosive legacy of present-day wars alone makes learning about the distant past a dangerous job. No tombs with pressure-triggered blow darts required.

Initiatives have attempted to correct the problem of unexploded ordnance in Afghanistan, notably in the region of Bamiyan. Bamiyan is the site of a medieval fortress and the gigantic niches where the famous Buddhas of Bamiyan once stood, before they were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. As Lindsay Aldrich, Suzanne Fiederlein, and Jessica Rosati report in The Journal of ERW and Mine Action, action was taken in 2008 and 2009 to demine the region.

This operation, led by the Mine Action Coordination Centre of Afghanistan (MACCA), in coordination with UNESCO and the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS), was an initiative that parallels my own fictional treatment of the demining of the mystical city of Shambhala in the aftermath of skirmishes between Tibetan insurgents and the Chinese army.

The Amar Chatterjees of this world are the kinds of people who work with organizations like MACCA and UNMAS, the ones who, like Qadir, face extreme danger for the sake of cultural heritage preservation. They are the ones who rally under the 1954 UNESCO Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which states that “cultural property has suffered grave damage during recent armed conflicts and that, by reason of the developments in the technique of warfare, it is in increasing danger of destruction.”

Amar is courageous, a workaday hero who preserves ancient antiquities at great personal risk, all while operating within the mission statements of international conventions. I hope you will listen to my story and enjoy my attempt to find an alternative to the fedora-swaggering heroes of yesterday.

Ever since I became serious as a freelance editor/proofreader and a participant on Critters.org, the oldest online writer’s critique group, I have encountered the same weakness in fiction over and over again. Partly, I think this is because people send early drafts to critiques and forego revision until they receive their first round of feedback.

In my opinion, writers could benefit from self-revision before submitting to critique groups because many weaknesses that make a story unreadable can be fixed by the writers themselves. Beta readers and critique groups are useful resources, but writers can improve their craft more reliably through deep practice.

As a tool to help writers improve their own work, I have provided the following list of common weaknesses in fiction.

1. Too little exposition, especially at the beginning.

Young or inexperienced writers are often advised to avoid exposition at all costs. It’s an info dump, boring, and uninteresting to read. But given the volume of fiction I have read where I did not feel grounded in the story, I am no longer convinced that this advice is unimpeachable.

Writers are told by creative writing teachers to begin in media res, but often, they begin their stories before they establish the res. In other words, they begin in ‘the middle of things‘ without establishing what those ‘things’ are, or where they are, or when they are. The characters are already running around doing things, but there is a certain level of knowledge the reader is presumed to have before they come to the text.

Unfortunately, there is no way for readers to access this information if it is not on the page! This is a problem especially frequent with speculative fiction openings, where a common reality between the reader and the fictional world is not necessarily assumed.

“Once upon a time, there was a young princess who loved to play with her toy ball.” This establishes a time, a character, and a setting. It is a perfect window into the “before” state prior to the main action. Every word is exposition: “telling” instead of “showing.” Yet, the words have a solidity and sense of narrative confidence that grounds the reader.

Writers often forget to use the narrator’s voice to convey important details of the story. This likely has to do with how most writers are raised on the visual formats of TV and movies instead of the nineteenth-century novels of yore. Since writers think they can see their characters in the movie of their mind’s eye, they think the reader will have no problem seeing that movie. But in these cases, this movie does not exist on the page.

Simply showing events does not ground the reader automatically. A certain amount of telling is often necessary. Keep exposition minimal in the middle of your story and at the end, but do not forget that exposition at the beginning may be necessary.

In modern literature, stream-of-consciousness and multiple viewpoints give a greater sense of the fragmentation of experience. But even if the narrator’s perspective no longer carries the authority it enjoyed in the nineteenth century, it must still anchor itself in those very limits. From that base, that creative center, the story expands outwards, growing steadily more complex, like coral.

2. Opening at the wrong time.

On occasion, a story might begin too early or late in the action. Introducing your story in media res can sometimes feel like filling a reader in about what happened when they were asleep during the first half of a movie. If you find that this is true for you, you might have begun the story too late.

On the other hand, when you write a character traveling or walking towards a fateful destination, chances are you have begun the story too early. This is called “walking to the story” and is a crutch writers fall back on. This is fine to do in rough drafts as a way to connect with your characters. But in subsequent drafts, it is usually a good idea to cut these moments out.

Sometimes the story begins with the right scene, but the wrong thing is being described. For example, there might be a few sentences of purposeless description done in the interest of painting a picture. Perhaps the colour of the sky is described or the colour of the protagonist’s hair. Often, this information is uninteresting to the reader who does not yet have a reason to care what the world looks like. They want to know what’s happening or at least have some unusual, privileged insight into a character presented to them.

Sometimes a story begins at the wrong moment simply because the reader tries to express an emotional reaction that has been given no context. In About Writing, Samuel Delaney provides a model for the three units of narrative that build on one another like blocks. Setting/location must be established firstly, followed by situation and conflict. As a result of this conflict, the reader lastly experiences affect, or emotional reaction (payoff). This model can be applied on any fractal level of narrative structure: paragraphs, beats, scenes, acts.

In cases where an emotional reaction begins a story but falls flat, the writer may have used the three units of narrative in reverse, beginning with affect without describing setting or situation. Unless the emotion is primal and/or the context swiftly provided, the reader may feel disconnected from the events.

Sometimes the story begins at the wrong chronological moment. Other times, it begins with the wrong details being described. Sometimes the fix is as simple as rearranging the order of a few sentences in a paragraph; other times, the story’s initial event must itself be rethought. Ideally, a story begins at a moment of dramatic interest where the relevant details can be shown and/or told in exposition that appears relevant to the action.

3. Unclear, unfelt stakes.

The next biggest weakness is a lack of clear, emotional stakes. By stakes I mean the question, “Why is this character performing this action?” Stakes have to do with risk and all the things the character has to lose or gain. The clearer the stakes, the more reasons to read on to see whether the protagonist gains or loses what they most value and love.

Unclear stakes often occur because readers have forgotten to make them explicit. Too much subtlety can sometimes result in a vagueness with regard to a character’s goal. But there is nothing wrong with a line that puts all the cards on the table for everyone to see: “Velma couldn’t let Clarice beat her at Bingo, or she’d never be able to look her knitting circle in the eye again.” The circumstances may appear trivial to a reader, but given the above example, no one can deny that Velma needs to win the Bingo tournament at Shady Maple Retirement Home to earn the regard of her peers.

Exposition can go a long way to making stakes clear, especially at the beginning of a story. Later in the story, stakes can be shown instead of told. For example, there might be a scene where Velma loses the Bingo game and the knitting group has a meeting without inviting her. Now the stakes are bigger: will she confront her knitting group and stand up for herself or wallow in self-pity about her loss? This is an escalation.

These stakes must not only be clear, but carry an emotional impact. The stakes of a story might be world-ending–a nuclear war scenario, for instance–but if the protagonist remains unaffected, the reader does too. Thus, the urgency of a stake has nothing to do with the volume of people affected but by the specificity of the emotions associated with it.

Velma’s need to earn the respect in her knitting circle might engage readers, while scavengers surviving in a post-nuclear Toronto might elicit no sympathy whatsoever. If the scavengers’ stakes have no emotional context, they will simply not matter to the reader.

Think of all the things George Bailey loses in It’s A Wonderful Life when he sees what Bedford Falls looks like in a world where he has never been born. He loses the Building & Loan, his family, and the optimism of the town itself, which has nowhere to turn to escape Mr. Potter’s exploitation. George stands to lose everything he cares about and the audience feels it.

The more particularized the stakes, the better. If the fate of the world is literally at stake in your story, a bland emotional reaction on your protagonist’s part, even if noble (“We have to save it!”), will not give an especially compelling reason to be interested in the character per se. If, however, the scavenger’s grandmother is alone at Shady Maple Retirement Home on Bingo Night and unaware of the danger of the incoming nuclear apocalypse, the stakes for the scavenger are more particularized–that is, specific for him. We might also feel a little sorry that grandma was never able to resolve the drama with her knitting circle.

Think of the reader’s attention as a tent on a windy mountaintop. You need many specific and poignant stakes to pin that tent down, keep your reader’s attention tethered to your story, and hold it there.

4. A lack of frontwork to prepare readers for revelations.

A revelation in your story that does not ‘land’ often confuses the reader instead of delivering the emotional or intellectual impact you desire. Fixing revelations involves hard work. In order to reveal information in your story in an impactful way, you have to do some frontwork.

For instance, in one story I read, a character was working on a mystery surrounding a crime, but before they could establish a baseline of assumptions about the case, the writer threw a curve ball: a surprise revelation revealed that the crime the character was investigating was itself a deception. The suspects, who were only vaguely described, were actually a cover-up for other criminals, who were even more vaguely described.

This was ineffective because I did not have a baseline of assumptions about the criminals already. This came from a lack of exposition. But the main issue was that the clues to the deception were not planted in advance. I was not engaging with this revelation on an intellectual level. I was just seeing it happen. One set of criminals were as good as the other.

At Odyssey, I learned the distinction between ‘surprise’ and ‘answer’ revelations. The distinction between these types of revelations lies in how they each generate a different kind of expectation in the reader. An answer revelation comes as the answer to a specific, limited question posed by the story. An example would be the classic whodunit. A surprise revelation comes out of the blue, but still creates the anticipation in the reader that the information revealed will cast a new light on what came before. For example, the characters might reinterpret specific clues, correcting an illusion or a misdirection.

To these two types of revelation, I would like to add the type of ironic revelation. In an ironic revelation, the reader or audience is aware of the content of the revelation, but specific characters in the story may not be. This is particularly common in comedy (Ex: “Nina’s been lying to you about being a Hollywood starlet ever since you first met.”).

Surprise revelations work because clues interpreted one way can become reinterpreted in another. But if these clues are unclearly indicated, or even absent, the revelation can fall flat or confuse the reader.

In another story I read, a character’s father was a supernatural being, but clues that could have served as subtle hints of this were skimmed over. This is where illusion or misdirection can help. For instance, if the father was trying to hide that he was a vampire, perhaps the son could be suspicious that he is a cocaine addict and find evidence to reinforce this idea–at least until the surprise revelation tells him otherwise.

The surprise revelation casts the specific clues placed earlier in the story in a new light. But it is fundamentally important to ensure those clues are doing the right work. Choose a specific, convincing way for the viewpoint character to misinterpret the clues. This misdirects the reader. Then, after the surprise revelation, those same clues are reinterpreted.

5. Stock or manipulated gestures.

This is probably one of the hardest issues to fix, but it is certainly one of the most common to find in fiction, especially in scenes with a lot of dialogue. “She smiled”, “he walked”, “he nodded”, “she raised her eyebrow”: If any of these short phrases sound familiar, you probably know that these expressions are overused. These body language beats are clichés and so often repeated, especially in early drafts, that it reduces writing to a boring sameness and repetitiousness.

It’s not that these gestures are an absolute evil. Plenty of published works throw in the odd eyebrow raise. It’s just that these expressions are rarely ideal. They often misrepresent the particularity of your characters’ personality and stifle their fullest expression. Having a startlingly unique character raise an eyebrow, nod, and walk around is almost like placing such a character in a straitjacket. Instead, they should express themselves using telling gestures authentic to themselves, their own setting, and their own situation.

Write stock gestures to get past the first draft. But after you have gained a better vision of your character and their personality, specify. Particularize. Instead of saying they smiled at someone, you can say they smiled at someone while looking the other way across the room. This implies inner conflict, that their attention lies elsewhere. Gestures demonstrating inner conflict can go a long way towards representing a character’s particularity.

Gestures can also seem like they are manipulated by the author. For example, a character who is usually depressed and/or self-critical would likely not smile to express happiness. Depending on their personality, they might not even smile to express sarcasm. Every character comes with an emotional range. You must ask yourself how this character would express happiness, or how that character might react to jealousy, and so on.

To recap, my advice comes down to two major themes: making sure the reader has all the information they need to enjoy the story and ensuring that characters are depicted in their particularity to generate deeper interest in those characters.

Your first draft will always be rough, but once you train yourself to spot these weaknesses in your own writing, you will be that much closer to developing better second drafts and becoming a more self-reliant writer.

Back in November, I met Claude Lalumière at the Yellow Door readings, where he read from his phantasmagorical mosaic Venera Dreams: A Weird Entertainment. His latest book details the history of a mysterious city-state and its erotically-charged populace of artists and madmen. It is a visionary piece of work filled with atavistic rituals, ancient goddess cults, and superheroes.

My interview with the author over the phone was published with Cult Montreal. Check it out!

You can order Venera Dreams as an ePub and Kindle edition from the publisher, Guernica Editions.

Library

Goodreads Book Reviews

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